The Card

Having a look at the GTX 680 2GB Phantom the first thing most people think is that we're dealing with a passive cooled video card. While we do indeed have a massive heatsink on the outside that has a number of heatpipes coming out the bottom, we do have two fans that sit behind.

While the design is a little strange looking to see at first, it has proven to work in the past and with the latest line up of video cards running cooler than ever, we should hopefully see some good numbers come out of the Phantom cooler.

The only issue with the design is that it's a triple slot card. While it's not a problem for most people who are opting for only a single card setup, it's something that you do need to take note of. If you have a RAID card or maybe a sound card that needs to go in the third slot, a triple slot video card is going to cause issues.

Moving around the video card you can see the dual power setup in the form of a single 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connector. Closer to the front we've got two SLI connectors, which let us get up to four of these video cards running together. Of course the large cooler design is going to make that difficult.

Looking at the I/O side of things we've got two Dual-Link DVI connectors in the form of a DVI-D and DVI-I port. Along with that you can see we've got a HDMI port alongside a full size DisplayPort connector to round everything off.

Specifications

As we mentioned earlier the Gainward GTX 680 2GB Phantom comes overclocked out of the box. Looking below you can see that both core and memory clock has been raised from the default NVIDIA speeds of 1006MHz / 1059MHz via boost and 6008MHz QDR.

You can see the core here comes in at 1085MHz which helps push the boost speed to 1150MHz while the 2GB of GDDR5 has been pushed to 6300MHz QDR.

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